About TLP

Talky Talky

Sarah Manguso

Sarah Manguso is the author, most recently, of The Two Kinds of Decay, which was named an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Her next book, The Guardians, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Granta Books next month.

01/17/2012

I was brought up quiet, amid strangers’ debris. When I was young, each week my parents and I visited the Wellesley (Massachusetts) Recycling and Disposal Facility. Monstrous containers held every kind of color-sorted glass, metal, paper, and earth. Beyond the bins was a cleared lot where my parents found tables and chairs and I found…